35/

Violet presses her head against the cool oak table. As she pulls away, she watches the murky figure of her reflection in the polished wood. “I’m just not sure how to explain this in any other way.”

He doesn’t look pleased with the answers. Andrew’s face is all scrunched together — his eyes and eyebrows and mouth tightly pulling toward the center of his face as he works things over in his head.

Violet fixes her gaze on the table just in front of him and studies the reflection of the light. Andrew is hunched over, elbows on the table, shoulders rounded up toward his ears, the various features of his face still gravitating toward his nose in his continued preoccupation.

“Okay,” he breaks the silence. “You’ve met future you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So then, conceivably, when the future you that you met was fourteen, she also met future her, who is also future you. So that’s future you’s future you. And she must have also met her future self, which means we’ve got at least five generations of future yous meeting past yous, and who knows how far back it goes.”

Violet tilts her head, lips pressed into a line, but says nothing.

“Look, Vi. Everything is governed by laws and rules. You’ve already told me some of them.” He takes her nod as an assent and continues. “How old was future you?”

Violet shrugs. “I was fourteen, every adult seemed ancient. But probably mid-thirties? I haven’t been on the other end of it yet.”

“Right. Okay, so then at some point in your future, you’ll travel back to meet fourteen-year-old you. And then, twenty-or-so years from now, she’ll also go back to visit past her.”

“I guess.”

“I guess the thing I can’t resolve is where did it start? The Universe wasn’t created with you already here. Even if there are infinite timelines, even if every moment of our lives could be viewed as discrete, static points in time and we’re just ambling from one to the next on a perpetual conveyor belt: there has to be a first one, and there has to be a last one. Somewhere. Right?”

Violet lays her head against the table again and stares at the wall, unspeaking. She drags her eyes up to meet his and then turns them back to the wall.

“So, okay. There has to be a time, somewhere, when you only existed as a child with no adult you that could travel back to visit you, because that was the first you, so to speak.” He curls his index and middle fingers into quote marks. “You said you can’t change anything in the past, which implies none of us have free will, and are just destined to follow along the tracks from earlier. But, that can’t be true, because there must have been a first time — somewhere — where there was no future you to visit past you. Which means when future you went back to visit past you, the past was changed. Which means that the timeline must, in theory, be able to change. And that, my dear, is a paradox.”

Violet continues to stare at the wall as she speaks. “I swear to God, if you say QED, I will throw something at you.”

Andrew wags his finger. “Except you’ve told me before, we’re still together in the future. And if what you say is true, then nothing changes, and we know how this works out, right?”

She glares at him. “If you’re right though, things can change. Because they must have, at least once. Maybe they’ll change again.”

“It would make me very sad,” he says. “But I’ve got to admit, the scientist in me would be very interested to see that this apparent written-in-stone timeline underwent another change.”

“Screw this,” Violet says. She closes her eyes and crosses her arms and in a moment the only trace of her is a pile of clothing slipping off the wooden chair onto the floor.

Andrew grins to an empty room. “QED,” he says.